Enterprise Web 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe on leveraging the convergence of IT and the next generation of the Web.

Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe is an expert in information technology, business strategy, and next-generation enterprises. He is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research as well as Chief Strategy Officer at 7Summits. A veteran of enterprise IT, Dion has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to bridge the widening gap between business and technology. He has extensive practical experience with enterprise technologies and he consults, advises, and writes prolifically on social business, IT, and enterprise architecture. Dion still works in the trenches with clients in the Fortune 1000, government, and Internet startup community. He is also a sought-after keynote speaker and is co-author of several books on 2.0 subjects including Web 2.0 Architectures from O'Reilly as well as the best-selling Social Business By Design from John Wiley & Sons (May, 2012.)

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A couple of recent announcements from two large, very well-known organizations provides some interesting data points on how Web 2.0 is affecting the product designs and business processes of otherwise very traditional institutions. Both USA Today and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office have recently unveiled strategies for letting their users use two-way Web capabilities to contribute directly to the products and services they offer. And many other mainstream companies, such as Pepsi as well as GM and XM Radio have been exploring externally-facing Web 2.0 concepts in their products for a while now.

In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today. Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.

One of the hallmarks of a good Web 2.0 site is one that hands over non-essential control to users, letting them contribute content, participate socially, and even fundamentally shape the site itself. The premise is that users will do a surprising amount of the hard work necessary to make the site successful, right down to creating the very information the site offers to its other users and even inviting their friends and family members to use it. Web 2.0 newcomers MySpace and YouTube have shown how this can be done on a mass scale surprisingly quickly, and of course older generation successes like eBay and craigslist have been doing this for years.

While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world. That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies -- from Ajax to social networking -- would actually be to the business world. However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead and experiment or conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out. That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run in the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.

Last year we witnessed the rise of consumer mashups on the Web, with hundreds of individual mashup-based Web applications being released in 2006 alone. I covered this phenomenon in detail in my year-end mashup wrap-up, but now this innovation in software development is gearing up to move inside the enterprise as a raft of tools get ready to provide the tools to make it possible. What will this mean for IT departments and end-users? Let's take a look.

Those that follow the trends on the Internet and the trends within the enterprise have long noticed a very similar direction in both spaces for a while now; a push to move their software to a real services model. The reasons for this push seem straightforward: easier integration between systems, a better foundation for building new applications, dynamic business process automation that crosses organizational boundaries, and better management and monitoring of IT systems.

I explored the rise of Enterprise 2.0 this year in last week's year in review post, but 2007 will likely prove to be a much more intriguing year for the trend. The demand side of Enterprise 2.0 is driven from a variety of sources that likely include a "long tail" of demand for on-the-fly IT solutions as well as the promise of enabling true collaborative problem solving (tacit interactions). But is the real story more complicated than a couple of causal roots?

Though the eponymous title of this blog refers to the application of all aspects of Web 2.0 to the enterprise both large and small, the big story this year has really been about a collaborative subset of Web 2.0, something referred to as Enterprise 2.0. Though the definition has continued to expand in some circles, Enterprise 2.0 describes the use of the latest freeform, emergent, social software tools that hold the promise to significantly improve the ways that we work together and collaborate. As an example, the liberal use of internal blogs and wikis with discoverable content frequently forms the foundation of an Enterprise 2.0 software strategy.

One of my favorite Internet stats to check out are the mashup and open API trendlines on the front page of Programmable Web. Consistently, month after month this year and right up until present day, we've seen the mashup stats climb intriguing steadiness. And along with hundreds of available Web APIs, we've also maintained a sustained rate of approximately three brand new mashup applications being released per day. Interesting growth, but is it the start of a major trend?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend I finally had time to compile my notes on a significant new Web 2.0 in the enterprise story that emerged earlier this month from the Web 2.0 Summit. At the same time, one of the inevitable recurring debates about Web 2.0 made its rounds on the blogosphere. Both pieces of news seem to be hallmarks of important and connected emerging trends on the Internet and are worth a closer look.

One of the most consistent trends on the Internet is the rise of open APIs and the applications built on top of them, known as mashups. Programmable Web currently lists over 1100 APIs that can be used for everything from building Web sites on top of Google Maps to using Amazon's powerful infrastructure APIs for storage and cluster computing. The underlying trend: The desire to easily remix the vast pool of high value data and services on the Web today into useful new solutions, at home and perhaps even in the enterprise.

The annual Web 2.0 Conference starts this Tuesday and with it comes an important update of the vision of the next generation of networked applications. Thus, the major event during the leadup to the conference is not the pending renaming of the conference to the Web 2.0 Summit, but the issuing of the most complete articulation yet of what exactly Web 2.0 is, something which the industry has frequently struggled with.

As browser-based software, SaaS, and Web 2.0 continue to make some inroads in the enterprise, it's the lack of useful pioneer reports that hampers the early adoptors. Sure, many of us witness the often amazing trends taking place out on the Web in the form of mountains of user generated content and communication and collaboration occuring en masse via blogs and spaces. But the big question is still with us: Can the motivations and context that makes the latest generation of software on the Web so compelling, and hence popular, be made just as meaningful in the enterprise?

Over the lifetime of this blog I've often written about using the latest Web-based software and tools to accomplish things on a completely different timescale than has been possible previously. Things like Ruby on Rails, mashups, syndication, and other lightweight software and service models seem to be changing the rules of the game out on the Web. What used to cost thousands to develop, now only costs hundreds, what took 5-10 people now only takes one or two. Many of these trends appear to be successfully optmizing for one all important variable in an increasingly time-challenged world; ease of development and consumption.

Last week I had the distinct honor of listening to Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee speak on Enterprise 2.0 at The New New Internet in Northern Virginia. I've written several times here about McAfee's thoughts and work about the use of freeform, emergent, social software to enable ad hoc collaboration. McAfee's work essentially applies and combines many of the key Web 2.0 concepts of social software, user generated content, and discoverability via search to the workplace.

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